You read that right. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has put its stamp of approval on the Terrafugia Transistion, a vehicle that gets 30 miles to the gallon on the ground and, with wings unfolded, cruises the skies at 115 miles per hour. It fits in a driveway and runs on regular ol' unleaded gas.

The Atlantic's James Fallows has the best reaction: Who Says America Is In Decline?

The vote was unanimous. President Obama's statement:

I am extremely grateful to the Senate for acting so quickly to confirm General Petraeus to lead our military effort in Afghanistan. General Petraeus is a pivotal part of our effort to succeed in Afghanistan - and in our broader effort to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda - and he has my full confidence. The Senate's quick action and General Petraeus's unrivaled experience will ensure we do not miss a beat in our strategy to break the Taliban's momentum and build Afghan capacity.

The torrid pace of activity on the management front over at OMB continues today, with the announcement of the first in a series of new governmentwide blanket purchase agreements negotiated by the General Services Administration, covering office supplies.

Dan Gordon, head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, will testify on Capitol Hill this afternoon about the new BPAs. The interesting part of the new approach is in Peter Orszag's description of it on the OMB blog: "unlike BPAs signed in the past, which typically covered only one agency, these BPAs apply to everyone, in every federal agency. Now every federal employee who buys office supplies from the winning contractors will automatically get the better prices GSA negotiated."

This marks a reversal of sorts of a trend that started several years ago known as "strategic sourcing." Under that approach, some agencies figured they actually could negotiate better deals for themselves than GSA could for government as a whole. Even before that, with the dawn of governmentwide acquisition contracts in the late 1990s, agencies looked to open up their contracts to other agencies, openly competing with contracts negotiated by GSA. Now it looks like the pendulum is swinging back in GSA's direction.

Update, 4:36 p.m.: Here's Gordon's testimony from the hearing. He said, "The efficiency of interagency and agency-wide contracts makes their popularity easy to understand, but concerns that we are not getting the best possible returns from these vehicles are also well founded. We have made some progress, but we must make much more."

On the issue of leveraging government's buying power, he noted:

Agency spending for many commonly-used items is typically fragmented across multiple departments, programs, and functions, which means that agencies often rely on hundreds of separate contracts, with pricing that varies widely. The result is that agencies often do not get the best price they could, leading to an unacceptable waste of taxpayer dollars.

We are working with agencies to change these inefficient practices. Effective strategic sourcing begins with good acquisition planning. The first step is convening a team of agency experts on the commodity at issue to understand agencies' needs, share pricing information, analyze spend data, and identify common requirements. This information allows us to maximize the benefits of competition by securing up-front spending commitments from agencies to increase vendor interest in the procurement (a point whose importance industry has underscored repeatedly). The competition should be structured in a way to maximize small business participation, and we should use innovative practices, such as reverse auctions, to drive down prices. Wherever appropriate, we should structure pricing to include ongoing price reductions during the life of the contract, as the quantity of the government's purchases passes cumulative thresholds. Finally, we need to require that vendors provide agency customers with detailed spend data so they can continually analyze their internal business processes, identify more efficient practices, achieve additional savings, and share best demonstrated practices with the commodity team in crafting future agreements.

Gordon said the new office supply BPAs will cut procurement costs for these items by as much as 20 percent, or close to $200 million, over the next four years.

OMB's Peter Orszag has made no secret of his disdain for federal information technology efforts, saying not only that staffers reported that going from the Obama presidential campaign into government was "like going from an X-box to an Atari," but also that "innovative uses of technology are scarce to nonexistent within the federal government," and, just this week, that agencies have "almost entirely missed" the technological transformation of the past two decades and as a result are "far behind on efficiency and service quality."

That last bit was too much for Chris Dorobek of Federal News Radio's "Dorobek Insider," who's been following federal technology trends for almost two decades. It's "utterly untrue" that agencies are that far behind, he writes in a lengthy open letter to Orszag, and pleads for an end to the "tired, tedious comparison between the public and private sectors."

I assume the purpose of Orszag's statements is to prod agencies to improve their use of technology -- and, more importantly, their service to citizens. But I'm also on the record as being a little taken aback by the level of the rhetoric. I wonder if OMB will shift its approach when Orszag departs in the direction of highlighting agency success stories -- even if they think they're few and far between.

The former Minerals Management Service is having some acronym issues. Al Kamen reports in the Washington Post that last week Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a formal order rechristening the reorganized agency as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement. The agency, perhaps recognizing that the new moniker was a bit of a mouthful, told folks it was OK to refer to it as "BOE."

Then came a rather sudden reversal. On Friday, Kamen writes, James G. Anderson, the new organization's acting associate director for administration and budget, told members of its executive committee in an e-mail that BOE was out, and "until further notice, the abbreviation BOEMRE should be used."

Why the switch? Here's a guess: Maybe agency leaders feared that the shortened acronym would appear to emphasize only the "Bureau of Ocean Energy" part of the name, which wouldn't exactly square with President Obama's admonition that it be a "watchdog," not a "partner" with the energy industry.

In any case, I applaud the Agency Formerly Known as MMS/BOE/BOEMRE for striking a blow for acronym accuracy. I guess I'm just a stickler, but it bugs me when agencies make up acronyms that don't exactly match their names. Yes, I'm talking about you, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

For the first time, federal agencies may be required to post extensive data on their use of service contracts. The Project on Government Oversight notes today that the House version of the fiscal 2011 Defense authorization bill includes provisions requiring that agencies issue detailed reports on their use of service contracts, including:

• A description of each service purchased.
• The organizational component responsible for administering the contract.
• The funding obligation and funding source.
• The contract type.
• The name of the contractor and place of performance.
• The number of contractor and subcontractor full time equivalents and the costs associated with their employment.
• Whether the contract is a personal services contract.
• Whether it was awarded on a noncompetitive basis.

It's just not happening, says NASA commander Alan Poindexter.

By Dawn Lim

Earlier this month, I sat in on a Navy panel called "Uniform Matters" at the 23rd annual Women's Leadership Symposium in Washington. "Why aren't we issued undergarments in the same color as our uniforms?" one female Navy attendee asked. She noted that the lack of matching bras might cause embarrassment during vigorous training. After initial gasps from other attendees, her question was met with applause all around.

Twenty years after the Tailhook scandal, attitudes in the military towards women have shifted, culminating in the Navy's removal of the ban on women aboard submarines. In a more confident position relative to their male colleagues, women now want to see their issues addressed.

"Before, when you were in uniform, you were genderless, you didn't have separate issues. A lot of pioneers chose not to pursue a family because they wanted to reach a certain professional level," said Stephanie Miller, the director of women's policy for the Navy, at the conference. "Now it's much easier to say, I am an intelligence officer and a woman."

According to a summary of results from latest 2008 Pregnancy and Parenthood Survey provided by a Navy spokeswoman, there was a "significant increase" in the percentage of female enlisted personnel who believe that a Navy woman should become pregnant "whenever she wants" compared to previous years. The survey also revealed a "noticeable increase" in the annual pregnancy rate amongst enlisted women between 2000 and 2007.

That's an issue for men, too. According to the survey, about 70 percent of those who get pregnant conceive a child with a military partner. In 2010, over 45,000 women in active duty were recorded as married to another member of the armed services.

"Men get pregnant too, they just don't carry the baby," Miller said at the symposium.

Earlier today, I wrote a post about the Supreme Court's ruling this morning that the way the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was set up under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act violates the Constitution. Members of the board get two layers of protection: They can only be removed by the Securities and Exchange Commission for cause, and the SEC's members can only be removed by the president for cause. The court's majority ruled that at least in the case of the board, that's one layer of protection too many.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer raises an interesting issue: What about the dozens of independent federal agencies who are headed by officials who have some degree of statutory protection from arbitrary removal? If they are, in turn, administered on a day-to-day basis by executives who also get protection from removal under civil service laws, doesn't that violate the two-layers principle? Here's how Breyer put it:

I ... see no way to avoid sweeping hundreds, perhaps thousands of high level government officials within the scope of the Court's holding, putting their job security and their administrative actions and decisions constitutionally at risk. To make even a conservative estimate, one would have to begin by listing federal departments, offices, bureaus and other agencies whose heads are by statute removable only "for cause." I have found 48 such agencies, which I have listed in Appendix A, infra. Then it would be necessary to identify the senior officials in those agencies (just below the top) who themselves are removable only "for cause." I have identified 573 such high-ranking officials, whom I have listed in Appendix B, infra. They include most of the leadership of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (including that agency's executive director as well as the directors of its Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and Office of Enforcement), virtually all of the leadership of the Social Security Administration, the executive directors of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the general counsels of the Chemical Safety Board, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, and the National Mediation Board.

This list, Breyer writes, is based only on career members of the Senior Executive Service. Other groups of career federal officials in protected positions, such as administrative law judges, might also be included -- as could, theoretically, military officers. (The precise definition of who might qualify as the type of official who could fall under the court's ruling depends in part on the murky definition of just who is an "inferior officer" under the Constitution.)

The majority opinion, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses Breyer's concerns, saying the court's ruling is limited to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board:

We do not decide the status of other government employees....Nothing in our opinion, therefore, should be read to cast doubt on the use of what is colloquially known as the civil service system within independent agencies.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision this morning, ruled that one particular part of the way the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was set up under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act violates the Constitution.

The board, whose members are appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a quasi-governmental entity with broad powers to oversee firms that audit public companies.

At issue in the case was, according to a summary of the decision issued by the court, the fact that "board members were insulated from presidential control by two layers of tenure protection: Board members could only be removed by the commission for good cause, and the commissioners could in turn only be removed by the president for good cause." It's acceptable to have one layer of protection against removal by the president under the Constitution, the justices ruled, but two simply doesn't cut it.

"We hold that such multilevel protection from removal is contrary to Article II's vesting of the executive power in the president," the court's majority opinion stated. "The president cannot 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' if he cannot oversee the faithfulness of the officers who execute them."

So why did Congress choose this kind of structure for the board in the first place? At least a partial explanation is buried in the opinion: "Congress created the board as a private 'nonprofit corporation,' and board members and employees are not considered government 'officer[s] or employee[s]' for statutory purposes. The board can thus recruit its members and employees from the private sector by paying salaries far above the standard government pay scale."

The board chairman's current salary is $673,000, according to the opinion. Other members get $547,000.

The White House is making official a policy announcement that leaked earlier this month: It is putting a halt to financial systems modernization efforts to see if they can be replaced with smaller projects that have shorter, more manageable deadlines.

The administration announced this morning that in addition, it will be "reviewing the IT projects at highest risk of failure, and improving IT procurement and project management."

More details this afternoon on Nextgov, after Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Jeffrey Zients and U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra hold a conference call to discuss the new initiatives.

Apparently, the third time is the charm. The Senate on Friday confirmed John S. Pistole, President Obama's third choice to head the Transportation Security Administration. Pistole has a full plate waiting for him over at the agency which has not had a permanent leader in more than a year.

TSA employees: What have you heard about the new boss? What's on your wishlist?

By Dawn Lim

The Federal Duck Stamp Office, part of the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service, has a strategy for saving waterfowl that might at first seem counterproductive: selling rights to hunt them.

The office's "duck stamps" serve as licenses required for hunting migratory waterfowl, but 98 cents out of every dollar from their sales will be used to purchase or lease wetland habitat for conservation. Talk about bang for the buck.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced this week that the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, which oversees the establishment of waterfowl refuges, approved $5.3 million in Federal Duck Stamp funds for wetland and wildlife conservation. Since 1934, sales of these stamps have generated more than $750 million to purchase and lease over 5.3 million acres of waterfowl habitat nationwide.

Not everyone buys duck stamps for hunting. Some might prefer to just collect and admire them. Check out the first duck stamp issued in 1934.

A Florida-based investment adviser who helped federal law enforcement officials manage their TSP accounts was found dead earlier this week of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a report in the Jacksonville Times-Union.

Wayne McLeod, who ran F&S Asset Management Group, Inc., told investors in a June 18 email that he was shutting down the FEBG fund, which catered to federal employees and promised impressive returns. McLeod pitched his services to employees at agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI.

According to the Times-Union, the SEC was investigating McLeod. "For those who are receiving current income via the interest payments for the month of June and beyond, those payments have been suspended and nothing further will be sent. You should expect to be contacted in the coming days or weeks by the regulators charged with this termination/task," the father of six wrote in the email to investors.

Today is Take Your Dog To Work Day, and we're pretty sure Capitol Hill is in on the action. But are federal agencies biting? Among the potential benefits, according to the U.S. Humane Society: better morale and a more productive work environment. What's not to like?

By Dawn Lim

As if Gen. Stanley McChrystal's big-bang farewell wasn't enough, another military leader is headed for the exits. Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, the director of the military's top center for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries, has unexpectedly stepped down, reports ProPublica.

The leadership of the Defense Centers of Excellence, or DCoE, will now fall on Col. Robert W. Saum, a former behavioral health science adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A spokeswoman said Sutton's departure was part of a routine command rotation. But ProPublica notes Sutton only was scheduled to retire next year, and has stepped down "apparently well ahead of schedule."

The news came as USA Today reported on Army task force findings highlighting the military's failure to provide consistent and coordinated pain relief to troops. This contributed to suicides, prescription drug abuse and aggravated cases of mental illness and brain injury in the military, the task force concluded.

There are other signs of cracks in the military's management of mental health issues. For instance, last month Government Executive senior correspondent Katherine McIntire Peters reported on questions surrounding the Pentagon's method of determining which instrument works best for evaluating mild traumatic brain injuries that can lead to serious impairment later on.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday approved the nomination of John Pistole to head the Transportation Security Administration. Republicans and Democrats have praised the choice of Pistole, deputy director of the FBI and a career civil servant, to lead an agency with a complicated mission and workforce morale issues. He is Obama's third pick to head TSA; the agency has been without a permanent leader for more than a year.

During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Pistole would not say whether he supported giving collective bargaining rights to security screeners -- a controversial topic within the agency. He said he would prioritize TSA's security work if confirmed, while acknowledging that doing so must be balanced with protecting the privacy rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens.

As Washington continues to roast in 90-plus degree heat, the company that manages Government Executive's office building has taken a few unusual (for us, at least) steps to save power, such as dimming hallway lighting and encouraging employees to close their blinds. That got us wondering whether the government -- an aspiring leader in conservation -- is making similar efforts. Has your agency gone to any special lengths to reduce energy usage during the latest heat wave, and has it affected your comfort in the office?

Move over Gene Sperling, Laura Tyson and Rob Nabors. New York University professor Paul Light wants to add another name to the short list of candidates to replace Peter Orszag in the top job at the Office of Management and Budget: former Comptroller General David Walker. The current crop of front-runners is heavily weighted toward the budget side of the job, but OMB needs someone who will pay more than lip service to management issues, Light argues. From that perspective, Walker does seem to fit the bill. During his 10-year tenure as head of the Government Accountability Office, he advocated sound management as one of several ways to head off an impending fiscal catastrophe. We also hear Walker, now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, plays a mean game of "Budgetball."

By Dawn Lim

Turns out Gen. Stanley McChrystal's tête-à-tête with President Obama after his biting remarks in the July issue of Rolling Stone was the now-former top military commander's swan song. The incident likely will change how government officials conduct themselves in front of the media.

What was McChrystal's mistake? He let his guard down, establishing a precedent for his aides to set a similar tone in front of the press. "It was a sort of natural kind of recklessness that General McChrystal had, which has been with him through his entire career, as I understand it. And inviting me in was obviously a risk, as it always is when you invite a journalist in," said Michael Hastings, the journalist who penned the damaging profile, in an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer.

Reporters spend their lives waiting to be invited (or crashing the party), hoping to catch an authentic moment. As the administration increasingly puts the pressure on feds to toe the line, I'm not sure if the doors into government workings will be as open to me as they have been.

The president's announcement today provided a clear message that when top military commanders diss their peers and superiors -- publicly or privately -- it can affect troops' ability to carry out their duties. It seems the event's repercussions already are being felt. "It's a reminder that I need to do my job well," a public relations officer at the Navy said on Wednesday morning.

By Dawn Lim

New York Times readers aren't too thrilled with TSA's screening personnel. Passengers wish "some screeners at the body scan machines were nicer and did not order travelers around as if they were jailhouse perps," writes Joe Sharkey.

One reader told Sharkey she "felt as if she were in a cage" as a screener admonished her for not paying closer attention to other travelers. Another said "comments and smirks" as a screener talked by headset to an unseen person at the image monitor led her to believe the two were "appraising each of the women going through."

Other travelers actually embraced the scanning machines because it meant not having to be patted down and having less face time with the screening staff -- food for thought, for those who find full body scanners disconcerting.

By Dawn Lim

Submarine smokers might want to consider investing in nicotine gum. By the end of this year, the Navy will ban cigarettes on board submarines to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke in those close quarters.

Once a mainstay of military life, cigarette use slowly has been rolled back over the years. According to a June 20 report in The New York Times:

"When America went to war in the past, tobacco went with them and cigarettes were part of military rations. But they are no longer contained in the Meals Ready to Eat field food packages, as the Defense Department does not want to officially encourage smoking. Now that legacy is seen only in the water-resistant matches placed in combat rations and officially defended as a survival tool. (But has anybody in Iraq had to build a campfire lately?)"

Some things, however, aren't changing any time soon. Last summer, Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave troops in high-pressure combat zones assurance that they would still be able to continue puffing away.

By Dawn Lim

The former Minerals Management Service has a new boss and a new name -- Michael Bromwich, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, respectively. A "well-deserved death" to an agency known for its "unusually egregious" behavior, James Surowiecki wrote in the June 14 issue of the New Yorker.

But the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill wasn't an isolated example of inept -- or nonexistent -- federal regulation, Surowiecki charges.

"The obvious problems of graft and the revolving door between government and industry, in other words, were really symptoms of a more fundamental pathology: regulation itself became delegitimatized, seen as little more than the tool of Washington busybodies. This view was exacerbated by the way regulation works in the U.S. Too many regulators, for instance, are political appointees, instead of civil servants. This erodes the kind of institutional identity that helps create esprit de corps, and often leads to politics trumping policy."

The solution? Elevate the status of federal regulators, according to Surowiecki. "That doesn't mean that the government needs to start putting out 'Men of the SEC' calendars, but it does need to instill in regulators the sense that their actions matter."

I know things are a little Orszag-heavy on FedBlog today, but wanted to pass along Joe Lieberman's reaction to the budget chief's departure. Lieberman, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sure doesn't make the job sound particularly appealing, citing the "tremendous challenges" that lay ahead for Orszag's successor.

"Peter Orszag has served his country at a time of unprecedented budgetary and economic peril, facing challenges beyond the norm for OMB and those who lead it. He has been instrumental in putting together a major recovery package, without which we might be facing a much worse situation today.

"Dr. Orszag has served this government ably for a number of years and at OMB has helped a new president manage the budgets of over 100 agencies, cabinet departments, boards and commissions, as well as playing a vital role in the passage of historic health care reform.

"Moving ahead, the next OMB Director will face tremendous challenges in righting our long-term fiscal imbalance and starting to close our enormous gaps in the debt and deficit. I look forward to working with whoever that Director is to tackle these historic problems facing our country. In the meantime, I wish Dr. Orszag all the best in his future endeavors and his return to private life."

What qualities do you think President Obama should look for in picking a successor to Peter Orszag?

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag plans to step down in July, making him the first Obama Cabinet official to leave, according to a Bloomberg report. The departure isn't altogether unexpected; according to Bloomberg, the budget chief tried to leave in April but stayed on at the president's request. As Bloomberg points out, Orzag's exit will leave a senior level hole as the president is trying to cut the ballooning deficit. We will have more on his resignation shortly.

By Dawn Lim

As the oil spill on the Gulf Coast spreads east to Florida, commissioners in Okaloosa County, Fla., are tired of waiting for the federal government to give them the green light to clean up their beaches. They're threatening to take matters into their own hands - even if it means breaking the law.

"We've played the game. We're done playing the game," said Okaloosa County Commission Chairman Wayne Harris according to the Destin Log. County commissioners voted unanimously last week to allow local emergency managers to bypass federal emergency managers, much to the chagrin of the Coast Guard.

"We're not looking to get into an argument, but there is an overriding federal interest in those waterways, and the safety of those waterways is the responsibility of the Coast Guard," Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen according to CNN.

County officials say they will continue to work with the state and federal authorities to get their plans approved. But they are frustrated with delays in authorization to move forward with the clean up.

"I think there's a fundamental flaw in the federal response," Dino Villani, the county's public safety director according to CNN. "When you're down in the trenches trying to respond like we are, it doesn't work."

"We made the decision legislatively to break the laws if necessary. We will do whatever it takes to protect our county's waterways and we're prepared to go to jail to do it," Harris according to the Destin Log.

E, all of the above, for those of you who hazarded a guess at my earlier question on weapons used against census workers. If that's not disturbing enough, consider that the crossbow came out only after the angry Californian mentioned his submachine gun, and -- more broadly speaking -- that some of the irate people saw census employees as agents of President Obama, rather than the government at large.

It's no secret that census takers are in a dangerous line of work. But you may be surprised at just how risky their jobs have gotten as they go door-to-door trying to reach some of the more elusive households. The Washington Post reports there have been 379 assaults or threats on Census Bureau workers during the 2010 count, compared to 181 a decade ago. Which of the following weapons do you think angry citizens wielded during the latest attacks:

a. A crossbow
b. A patio table
c. A baseball bat
d. A pit bull
e. All of the above

Check back this afternoon for the answer.

At our technology site, Nextgov, Emily Long reports on an analysis by Justin Kirstner of Webtrends that concludes we're well in the Era of Social Media on the web. (It follows on the first two eras: New Media and Web 2.0.)

In fact, Kirstner argues, we're so far into the social media era that its end is on the horizon. "Assuming that social media has a similar hype cycle to Web 2.0, it should peak around the beginning of 2012 with the next phase of the web taking over around 2015," he writes.

Given trends in the previous eras, I'll ask -- not entirely facetiously -- does this mean that the era of social media in government is about to begin? If public officials are beginning to do things like tweet notices of executions, then maybe the answer is yes.

I'll be out next week for a little R&R in the great state of Minnesota. But fear not, Elizabeth Newell, Kellie Lunney and Amelia Gruber of our staff will be stepping up to provide their insights on what's happening in the federal world.

I'll be back on June 28.

This is one of those stories that if, true, isn't going to do much for the image of the federal government's disaster response capabilities. ABC News reports that 16 oil-sucking barges sat still for more than 24 hours in the Gulf of Mexico this week, unable to contribute to the response effort. The reason: The Coast Guard "needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges."

The barges were approved to start working again after Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal loudly protested.

Big announcement coming today from the White House: President Obama will order agencies to create a "do not pay" list in an effort to prevent payments under federal programs to people and organizations who aren't eligible to receive them.

In March, the Office of Management and Budget and the Treasury Department issued guidance aimed at reducing improper payments. Agencies reported $98 billion in erroneous payments last year, up $30 billion over 2008. In November 2009, President Obama issued an executive order requiring agencies to step up their efforts to eliminate errors.

We'll have more details on today's announcement on GovExec.com when it's made official.

Q: What holds more water than the Great Lakes?
A: The moon.

(Hat tip: Slashdot)

Those ubiquitous postal service vehicles that have become an iconic symbol of the agency have a long life -- about 24 years. Unfortunately, many of them are reaching the end of that life cycle at the same time, Ed O'Keefe reports.

Postal officials estimate it would cost $4.2 billion to replace the fleet, so for now they're trying to keep the vehicles running as long as possible -- even though repair bills are increasing.

John Morton, assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Homeland Security Department, has announced a reorganization of his bureau, the Washington Post reports. The agency will now have three directorates, covering investigations, immigration and management.

The idea, Morton said, is to show the agency's "true face." The public perception is that ICE focuses solely on civil immigration enforcement, when that's only about half its job, he said.

Katherine McIntire Peters profiled Morton in in the June issue of Government Executive. She noted that one of his big challenges in the current highly charged climate regarding immigration is increasing the agency's credibility when it comes to enforcing existing laws, to help convince lawmakers it can manage proposed immigration reforms. Morton said he would do that by focusing ICE's resources on criminal investigations:

The bureau's highest enforcement priority is going after those who pose a national security threat or are criminal offenders. "Whether or not everybody has the same view of how many immigrants should come into the country lawfully or not, most people agree that if you come here unlawfully and you start committing crimes, you're not the kind of person we want," Morton says.

National Geographic has a slide show up of vintage National Park Service posters funded by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. It includes some real beauties.

Here's my personal favorite (although I may be biased by the fact that I'm a big fan of Montana):

(Hat tip: BoingBoing)

President Obama's announcement yesterday that he had picked former Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich to head the Minerals Management Service is shaping up as a watershed moment. It marks the first time that an IG has gone on to head an entire agency, doesn't it? That in itself is a landmark development.

In his address to the nation on the oil spill last night, Obama described MMS this way:

One place we've already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.

When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency. But it's now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow. And so Secretary Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency -- Michael Bromwich, who was a tough federal prosecutor and inspector general. And his charge over the next few months is to build an organization that acts as the oil industry's watchdog -- not its partner.

This might require a change in the MMS mission statement, which reads as follows:

The MMS's mission is to manage the ocean energy and mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf and Federal and American Indian mineral revenues to enhance public and trust benefits, promote responsible use, and realize fair value.

There's a bit of "watchdog" in there, but a lot of "partner," too. So you can't overstate the task Bromwich has in front of him. Reorganizing an agency is one thing; completely transforming its culture is a far more daunting task.

Suspicious envelopes containing white powder were found on Monday at eight federal office buildings in Idaho, Utah and Washington state, Ed O'Keefe reports.

The letters were discovered at various offices in Coeur d'Alene, Boise and Pocatello, Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Seattle, Bellevue and Spokane, Wash.

So far, no injuries have been reported, and initial tests on the envelopes have come back negative. The Associated Press reports that a field test on the substance found in Bellevue showed that its major component was calcium carbonate.

The FBI is conducting an investigation into whether the envelopes are linked, which certainly seems likely.

Gary Brooks Faulkner, a California construction worker, apparently thought he could pull off something the U.S. military has been unable to accomplish since Sept. 11, 2001: tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden.

Faulkner was detained in Pakistan, and told intelligence officials he was on a one-man mission to take down Bin Laden, the Associated Press reports. They didn't take him too seriously until they realized he was armed with a pistol, a 40-inch sword and night vision equipment, and that he had traveled to Pakistan seven times.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about, NASA is now issuing warnings that the earth could be hit with unprecedented levels of levels of magnetic energy as a result of solar flares in 2013, the Telegraph reports. The storms could have a devastating effect on the electrical power grid and satellite systems, disrupting everything from banking systems to GPS navigation.

Government Executive will feature a piece by former NASA lead writer Edward Goldstein on the potential effects of the solar storms -- and what federal agencies are doing to prepare for them -- in the July issue of the magazine.

(Hat tip: Slashdot)

A group of thieves is targeting federal offices in Washington's Virginia suburbs, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder reports today.

The criminals take advantage of the ubiquitous ID badge systems used in buildings that house government offices -- and of the courtesy of actual employees of those buildings. Outfitting themselves with fake ID badges hung from lanyards, the thieves loiter near entrances and follow unsuspecting employees into entrances. Once they get in, they steal employees' personal property, including cash and credit cards.

It's not clear yet whether the thieves also might be after sensitive government information. The Secret Service, the Diplomatic Security Service and the Arlington County Police Department are conducting a joint investigation.

President Obama made the case this weekend that there's a certain, shall we say, lack of consistency in attitudes toward government in general and and reaction to the Gulf oil spill in particular. Here he is in a Politico interview:

I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.

And there's more:

Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying '"do something" are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much. Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.

Many Americans say they don't like big government, but almost all Americans want effective government -- particularly a government that handles all manner of disasters and crises with dispatch. The problem is that it's hard to do that -- not to mention all the other routine jobs we expect government to handle, from air traffic control to food safety inspection -- without a very large government.

Over at our sister publication the Atlantic (I just love saying that), the estimable James Fallows weighs in again this week on one of his favorite subjects: The failure of the Senate to move with dispatch to pass judgment on nominees for politically appointed posts in government.

Specifically, Fallows decries Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's move to hold up action on 80 of President Obama's nominees on the grounds that he doesn't like one of them (Craig Becker of the National Labor Relations Board -- who, ironically, already is in his position via a recess appointment).

"This is an insane way to do the nation's business," Fallows writes. He all but throws up his hands in the quest for a long-term solution to the problem, but suggests that the "power of public embarrassment" be used in the short term against serial abusers of Senate "holds."

There's another side to this problem, though. Even if the Senate speedily passed judgment on Obama's nominations, President Obama would have to make close to 1,000 of them (and another 2,000 more that don't require Senate action). As Paul Light is fond of pointing out, one solution to the confirmation crisis is simply to have fewer political appointees. While still a small sliver of the total federal workforce, appointees are a much higher percentage of it than they used to be.

The nation is fortunate to have a highly qualified, dedicated cadre of senior executives who have dedicated their careers to public service. If we as a nation were more willing to put our trust in them (and hold them accountable, of course), maybe we wouldn't be sitting around a year and a half into a president's term wondering when he'll have his team in place.

There is an alternative to the endless transition that has come to characterize the American governance system. Just ask the British.

An update from CongressDaily:

A bipartisan group House and Senate members led by House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank today unveiled nearly $1 trillion in defense savings over the next 10 years to help bring down the deficit. The group, made up of Frank, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Reps. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., Walter Jones, R-N.C., and Ron Paul, R-Texas, commissioned a report by outside experts, that among other things, proposes reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal by 1,000 warheads and canceling the acquisition of the F-35 fighter jet. Frank said he would encourage colleagues to pressure President Obama's deficit reduction commission to include the changes in any formal proposal.

More to come on this later.

Taco Bell is lobbying the Federal Reserve to put more $2 bills in circulation, reports Sudeep Reddy at the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog.

Is the campaign for real? The fast-food chain's tongue appears to be pretty firmly in cheek in a full-page ad it ran in USA Today. The ad declares that with the new $2 meal deals Taco Bell is offering, "we want to make sure there are enough $2 bills in circulation to meet the pending demand. So Taco Bell is asking the Federal Reserve to circulate more $2 bills (millions of them if you can)."

But then there's the matter of the petition Taco Bell has put up on its Facebook page asking its fans to push the Fed to circulate more $2 bills. An at least serious-looking company statement notes:

The scarcity of the $2 bill in circulation and the lack of public awareness for it have inspired urban legends about its existence. The petition provides a unique way for fans of Taco Bell to be introduced to the $2 bill, or get reacquainted with it...

As Reddy notes, the petition is unlikely to be effective. The only real way to get the Fed to circulate more of any kind of currency is for consumers to use it more often, and request specific denominations from their banks.

This is the kind of power you have as president: Congress created the Women's Bureau in the Labor Department on June 5, 1920. Yesterday, President Obama issued a proclamation declaring:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 11, 2010, as the 90th Anniversary of the Department of Labor Women's Bureau.

I had no idea that the Constitution vested the president with the authority to alter the calendar.

Update, 1:51 p.m.: Apparently the president is an equal opportunity calendar modifier. This just in from the White House press office:

President Obama to Celebrate Father's Day

WASHINGTON, D.C. - On Monday, June 21, President Obama will celebrate Father's Day and discuss the importance of responsible fatherhood and mentoring to build healthy families and communities.

For the rest of us, I think Father's Day will be on Sunday the 20th.

Wow, I had no idea the OMB director actually was reading this blog. I guess I'll keep that in mind the next time I post something snarky about TV shows or rodents at the White House.

I'm referring to Peter Orszag's post on OMB's blog responding to my post yesterday about his recent comment that federal employees have more access to "cutting-edge computer power and programs" on their smartphones than at their offices. I wondered whether that might be overstating the case a little bit.

Orszag makes the very good point that it all depends on the definition of "computer power and programs." He says rather than looking at it in terms of things like processor speed, it "may be best defined as one's ability to use technology to interact with the world in a rapid, user-friendly way." And he goes on to note that on his personal BlackBerry he "can track the status of a shipment, buy goods and services, make travel, hotel and restaurant reservations, and collaborate with friends and colleagues - all online pretty much anytime and anywhere."

Orszag laments that innovative technologies like the hundreds of thousands of apps that have been developed for the iPhone "are scarce to nonexistent within the federal government." He says agencies need to focus on the "rapid development and implementation of useful services," and it's hard to argue with that.

What's more, one of the commenters on my previous post makes the point that I could very well be wrong that my eight-to-10 year old computer actually had more power than my Droid phone.

(And by the way, I'll also add, just because I can't resist, that while it's nice to wake up to discover that the Washington Post has taken note of your exchange with the OMB director, the very definition of a mixed blessing is to find yourself described as the "dean" of something.)

At the New York Times today, columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins had a discussion about yesterday's primary elections, touching on the failure of labor unions to meet their goal of mounting a challenge from the left to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark. Along the way, Brooks and Collins raised the issue of the ascendance in the labor movement of unions representing government employees.

"The unions are becoming a public sector lobbying arm," Brooks said. Collins piled on:

I'm not comfortable with a situation in which the only unions that continue to flourish are the ones for public employees. It's crazy that it's easier to create a union for high school principals than underpaid slaughterhouse workers or chicken-pluckers. The people who most need the benefits of unionization are the ones that have the hardest time getting it.

Seriously. Danger Room has the proof.

During his speech yesterday at the Center for American Progress on cutting spending and increasing productivity in government, OMB Director Peter Orszag drove home a point he's fond of making: that the information technology gap between the public and private sectors is large and growing.

Orszag put it this way:

At one time, a federal worker went to the office and had access to cutting-edge computer power and programs. Now, he often has more of both clipped to a device on his belt.

That's a clever bit of rhetoric. But is it close to being true? I accept the notion that much of government isn't on the cutting edge when it comes to computers any more. But more computing power on your iPhone or BlackBerry? That seems like a stretch.

I have what I'd like to think is a state of the art Android-based smartphone (in my pocket, not clipped to my belt, thank you very much) but it doesn't have anywhere near the computing power of the PC I had on my desk eight or 10 years ago. Is government really this far behind?

Looks like the mighty Transformers have met their match: The United States National Park Service. The machines from space were set to invade Washington until the Park Service started throwing its weight around.

Producers of the upcoming Transformers 3 had hoped to spend about two weeks filming in Washington, especially near its iconic landmarks, the Washington Post reports. But they got a little crazy with their plans, especially with some rather extensive action sequences.

Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, told the paper that the producers, including Steven Spielberg, "have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall," like racing cars along its gravel paths. "The National Mall is not an area in which Americans come to see high-tech action movies being shot," Line said.

Now the filmmakers might spend less than a week in D.C. on a more simplified shoot.

Following on yesterday's news that the Obama administration was preparing to launch a program to allow agencies to keep half the savings they generate from cutting spending, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag is set to detail further details of the plan this morning at the Center for American Progress in Washington. It involves asking domestic agencies to cut their spending by 5 percent, targeting their poorest-performing programs.

Here are some excerpts from Orszag's prepared remarks, courtesy of the White House:

Right now, there are over 110 funded programs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education in 14 departments and agencies; over 100 programs that support youth mentoring scattered across 13 agencies; and more than 40 programs located in 11 departments with responsibility for employment and training. This redundancy wastes resources and makes it harder to act on each of these worthy goals....

I believe that the biggest driver of this productivity divide is the information technology gap. At one time, a federal worker went to the office and had access to the most cutting-edge computing power and programs. Now, he often has more of both in a device clipped to his belt....

As many of you know, in this year's budget, the president proposed a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary funding, saving $250 billion over the next decade. This spending restraint complements other measures in the budget that, together, produce more deficit reduction over the next 10 years than any budget that has been proposed in over a decade.

In his State of the Union address, the president was abundantly clear to Congress that he will use the veto pen to enforce this freeze. And in the budget guidance for fiscal year 2012 issued to agencies this morning, that seriousness of purpose was underscored yet again. We are asking each agency to develop a list of their bottom 5 percent performing discretionary programs, as measured by their impact in furthering the agency's mission.

In addition, to ensure that we can meet the president's insistence on a freeze for non-security agencies while funding priority areas, we are asking non-security agencies to specify how they would reduce their budgets by 5 percent - which will give us the ability to achieve the overall non-security freeze even while meeting inevitable new needs and priorities.

Ahhh, the fanny pack: The triumph of substance over style, a look that boldly says, "I care not for fashion statements. I need to carry some damn stuff around."

Well, the Air Force apparently has something in common with the fashionistas who cringe at the sight of this kind of purely functional accessorizing. There's no provision for wearing fanny packs in the service's regulations on "dress and personal appearance." Jeff Schogol, the "Rumor Doctor" at Stars and Stripes, actually asked about the policy because apparently there's a message being circulated on Facebook to the effect that the Air Force had revised its regs to approve fanny packs. Not so, Air Force spokesman 1st Lt. Derek White told him via e-mail: "There is no guidance regarding the wear of fanny packs in uniform."

Schogol's diagnosis: "The rumor is fake." Which begs the question: How did this issue arise on Facebook in the first place? Are there legions of fanny-pack backers in the Air Force crossing their fingers hoping for a change in the dress code?

(Hat tip: Atlantic Wire)

There'll be none of this in the Air Force.

It's an annual ritual at federal agencies: Spend as much of your budget as you can (without going over, of course), because the rest goes right back to the Treasury -- and may be withheld from you the following year on the grounds you didn't really need it.

The Obama administration has a different idea. According to the Wall Street Journal (full article behind paywall) the administration is readying a proposal that would allow agencies who underspend their budgets to redirect half of the savings to other programs. It's a modest effort, covering only about $25 billion in spending. And it's likely to be met with a great degree of skepticism on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers like exercising full control over agencies' purse strings.

In a sense, the program is designed to take the Pentagon's effort to identify $100 billion in overhead savings to pay for weapons systems and force structure and implement it governmentwide. Under that initiative, each of the military services must come up with $2 billion in savings for the Pentagon's fiscal 2012 budget request. But they get to keep the money to pay for weapons modernization and maintaining the force.

It's easy to take potshots at the military for spending upwards of $500 million (according to the Washington Post) to upgrade the facility at Guantanamo Bay since the beginning of the war on terror. I, for one, don't think it's a big deal to provide service members with access to creature comforts like Starbucks and KFC. And athletic fields, running tracks and even volleyball courts serve a genuine purpose in not only providing recreation but promoting troops' physical fitness.

But $296,000 for a go-kart track? Really?

By Dawn Lim

Democratic lawmakers managed to get Congress to vote to overturn the ban on gays serving openly in the military last week, clearing the path for the Pentagon to end its "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Now that the policy's days are numbered, foreign military officers who've gone through a similar process say the Pentagon should move swiftly to end it and move on.

According to the Brookings Institution, overseas military officers and experts at a conference that it co-hosted with the University of California Santa Barbara's Palm Center last month said a quick shift would be the most painless.

"I would recommend that the key decision is whether or not you're going to go that way and the rest of it is just support to it," said Maj. Gen. Simon Willis of the Australian Defense Forces. "And if you can get the support wrapped up in it more quickly, I think it's much better."

Willis added that for all the heated debate, the actual implementation would likely be pretty routine.

The "lifting of the homosexual ban in the ADF was a bit like the Y2K issue," he said. "There [was] a lot of bluster and screaming and yelling and plans, and everyone had an opinion about it. But it came and went, and that was it. Nothing more was heard about it. It was a non-event and it continues to be a non-event in Australia."

Retired officers said that the coming out process for members of the military probably would proceed without much fanfare.

"There were concerns in the late '90s of gay men walking across the gangplank in feather boas and high heels," said retired Lt. Cmdr. Craig Jones of the British Royal Navy. "That just did not happen."

Glasses being sold at McDonald's featuring cute characters from the new movie Shrek Forever After come with an unfortunate bonus ingredient, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission: Cadmium.

As a result, the Associated Press reports, McDonald's is recalling 12 million of the souvenir glasses.

Cadmium, a type of metal, is a known carcinogen. It is used to create red and yellow colors in paint. The CPSC says "a very small amount of cadmium" might rise to the surface of the glasses, get on children's hands, and end up in their mouths. The agency says the glasses have a lot less cadmium than it recently found in certain brands of children's metal jewelry, but officials are erring on the side of caution.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced today that Samuel I. Kaplan, an information technology program manager at an FBI facility in Chantilly, Va., had pleaded guilty late Wednesday to possessing child pornography.

Kaplan had 10 to 20 images on his home computer of minors engaged in sexual conduct, which were found in the course of an investigation launched after he "was discovered using the FBI's network to facilitate sexually explicit communications," prosecutors said.

(Hat tip: Danger Room)

Airlines are gearing up to implement new federal rules this summer providing relief to passengers trapped on flights that don't take off hours on end, Scott McCartney reports in the Wall Street Journal today.

After two hours of waiting on the tarmac, passengers must be offered beverages and snacks. "That's when we start mobilizing pretzels and water," says Holden Shannon, a senior vice president at Continental Airlines.

After three hours, in most instances airlines must give passengers the option of getting off the plane. To do that, Continental actually is setting up areas at its hub airports where passengers can be offloaded without aircraft returning to gates. Those who opt to get off will be ferried back to the terminal in vans. But they can forget about getting their checked baggage.

During the huge snowstorms that blanketed the Washington area last winter, employees in at least one agency teleworked their way through the days-long government shutdown.

Ed O'Keefe reports today on a survey by the National Labor Relations Board inspector general showing that half of NLRB employees said they worked at home for at least some period of time during the storm.

The employees put in an average of about three hours per day of work. More than two thirds of employees who responded to the survey said they had a government-issued laptop they could bring home if necessary.

The real troopers, though, were the 6.4 percent of NLRB employees who said they struggled into the office at least one day during Snowmageddon.

Over at the Washington Post's Story Lab, Michael S. Rosenwald is convinced that Washington is a BlackBerry town. "Everywhere you look in the region -- if you can take your eyes off your smartphone -- people seem to be on BlackBerrys," he writes. "But everywhere you look in other big cites -- such as New York -- people are on iPhones."

Blame it on the government, Rosenwald says. He declares "it's all BlackBerry --- largely for security reasons," and wonders whether "government's dominance in the BlackBerry world spread like a virus to other employers around the region that interact with bureaucrats."

What say you? Does BlackBerry rule the halls of government? Myself, I'm a committed Droid user.

From Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Refom Committee:

Did a great Rolling Stone interview on Team Oversight's MMS/#oilspill investigation from my motorcycle on the 15. I'll share when posted

Does NASA need a new logo? The design firm Base thinks so. The agency "is doing super-cool, interesting, worthwhile things, and is completely undersold by its logo," the firm says. That would be this, known as the "meatball":

So what does the design firm suggest? That a new approach should "de-emphasize the name in the logo to create more of a symbol that would be universally understood." Like this:

Pretty cool, but if you asked me what message it sends, I'd say this: "An agency in eclipse." Not sure that's what NASA needs.

By the way, this wouldn't be the first time NASA experimented with a new logo. While the meatball dates back to the agency's creation in 1959, in 1975, the NASA switched to what officials thought would be a more contemporary look that emphasized the agency's name. It became known as the "worm":

In 1992, agency leaders decided they liked the classic look better, and they've stuck with the tried-and-true ever since.

Hat tip: Atlantic Wire

Conservative muckraking undercover videographer James O'Keefe -- who got famous last with his infiltration of the offices of community organizing association ACORN and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. -- is at it again, and this time his target is the Census Bureau.

The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe (no relation to James) reports today on James O'Keefe's release of hidden camera footage showing training sessions for temporary Census workers in New Jersey, where he was hired on April 27. O'Keefe says he and other temp employees were ordered to fill out identical time sheets for training sessions that included hours when they did not actually work.

The fact that O'Keefe secretly taped the training sessions and his discussions with supervisors about the pay issue may come back to haunt him. A Census Bureau official told Ed O'Keefe that such action appears to violate Commerce Department policies.

Four years ago, I did a series of posts about federal agency mascots. In the process, I learned there were many more than I realized.

So I guess it doesn't surprise me that agencies, especially newer ones, are still prone to developing mascot envy. The latest case in point is Recovery.gov, the official website for data related to implementation of the Recovery Act. The folks there have posted an update on their Facebook page saying they're holding a contest to create a mascot that embodies the site's mission and purpose ("Think transparency and accountability!" they say.)

"Creativity and ingenuity" are required, and entries are due July 1. Hmmm, given that Recovery.gov is run by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency (or "RAT") Board, I think they should expect a lot of rodents. Or if transparency is what they're after, maybe this guy is available.

Courtesy of the Washington Post, a photo gallery.